Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2012 May 4;7(5):e36282. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036282

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

Fritsche et al.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.

PMC Copyright notice

(a) Intrachain entanglement (“self-entanglement”) and (b) interchain entanglement measured by the mean average crossing number mACN as a function of chain rigidity . Tethering the SC polymer's ends to the borders of the confining cavity induces fewer chain overcrossings than the “null model” consisting of free semiflexible polymers in confinement, which suggests that the interplay between tethering and confinement might help to prevent an excess of chain overcrossings. However, semiflexibility induces a trade-off in both polymer systems between the amount of intrachain- and interchain-entanglement which has to be balanced with respect to interlock resolution. Notably, we find a surprisingly low amount of both types of chain overcrossings for the 4Pi microscopy dataset, mACN and mACN, which cannot be explained within our SC polymer model.

Inline graphic — (a) Intrachain entanglement (“self-entanglement”) and (b) interchain entanglement measured by the mean average crossing number mACN as a function of chain rigidity . Tethering the SC polymer's ends to the borders of the confining cavity induces fewer chain overcrossings than the “null model” consisting of free semiflexible polymers in confinement, which suggests that the interplay between tethering and confinement might help to prevent an excess of chain overcrossings. However, semiflexibility induces a trade-off in both polymer systems between the amount of intrachain- and interchain-entanglement which has to be balanced with respect to interlock resolution. Notably, we find a surprisingly low amount of both types of chain overcrossings for the 4Pi microscopy dataset, mACN and mACN, which cannot be explained within our SC polymer model.